Not only are some non-uniformed state workers getting dressed on the state’s dime, those whose work does require special clothing receive much more than neighboring states provide their employees. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the state provides uniforms to those workers who need them. Others get a $100 annual clothing allowance.

In New Jersey, the stipend works out to $700 for each employee. Yet a survey determined 48 percent do not even wear special clothes to work. Only 18 percent of white-collar workers are required to don special garb to work, the comptroller's report concludes.

What’s more, the New Jersey does not require receipts for the clothing.

"The state spends millions of dollars every year to cover the cost of uniforms for state employees who don't actually wear uniforms," Comptroller Matthew Boxer said last week. "It's absurd."

We’d have to agree.

The head of the state workers largest union, the Communications Workers of America, does not.

Hetty Rosenstein, N.J. director for the CWA, dismisses the report as "inaccurate and misleading." She says Mr. Boxer surveyed human resource employees to determine who needed clothing stipends but didn't talk to any of the rank and file wearing them.

"Public workers who have received a modest clothing stipend have been carefully negotiated on a job-by-job basis through the collective bargaining process between the state and its workers," Rosenstein said in a Star-Ledger report by Ginger Gibson.

The payments are made to employees identified by title in union contracts that have been in place for more than a decade. Those deals were made in the largesse of better times, before the clench of recession prompted more thorough reviews.

Instead of dismissing the comptroller’s audit as out of hand, Ms. Rosenstein might help her cause and her union by an honest assessment of need vs. precedent.

We don’t begrudge those employees who need protective clothing or special uniforms the wherewithal to pay for them.

We do object to picking up the tab for outfitting those workers who do not need or use particular clothes for their jobs.

As the state begins renegotiating collective-bargaining agreements that expire at the end of June, the uniform subsidy should be on the table. Clearly, some public employees subject their uniforms to daily wear and tear in the line of duty more than state workers in an office -- if those office workers were to wear uniforms.